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a2png(1) USER COMMANDS a2png(1)
NAME
a2png - convert ASCII text to PNG bitmap image
SYNOPSISa2png [ options ] [ file(s) ]
DESCRIPTIONa2png reads text from files or standard input and renders them to a PNG
bitmap image. The first version is pretty simple, and will only handle
newlines, carriage returns and tabs -- ANSI schemes is not supported.
The Cairo graphics library is used for rendering the file in memory.
OPTIONS- Read text from standard input
--background=...
Set background color. The format is the same as for HTML/CSS,
i.e. aabbcc, in RGB values. Default is black (000000).
--bold Use bold font.
--charspacing=...
Set horizontal spacing between characters in pixels. Default is
0. You can also use negative.
--fixed
Make any font fixed-width by using the horizontal spacing of the
widest character in the Latin1 character set.
--font=...
Set font family to use. You can either point directly to a font
file, as in --font=myfont.ttf, or simply the name "myfont" if
that font exists as myfont.ttf or myfont.ttc in the default font
search path.
If you want to use a font in your current directory, you must
specify it like this: --font=./fontname.ttf
You can also set your own font search path with a comma delim-
ited list in the environment variable GDFONTPATH, if you are us-
ing gdlib for rendering.
If you have ghostscript installed, you can do a `which gs' and
investigate that path's share/ghostscript/fonts/, e.g. /usr/lo-
cal/share/ghostscript/fonts/. If you find any ghostscript
fonts, you can try using one of them. Check out the file
`Fontmap' in that directory for descriptive names for those
fonts.
Both Cairo and GD use Freetype as a font subsystem, so you can
try some fonts with that distribution. The --font parameter can
hence read any fonts that Freetype can handle, so you can try
with almost any font formats (including truetype fonts).
If you are using Cairo, then a lot of fonts like "Fixed" are
shipped with the installation. In that case, you cannot use GD-
FONTPATH.
In most cases you will want to use a monospaced font, such as
`Courier' or `Courier New'. If you don't have any monospaced
font, you can emulate the behaviour by using the option --fixed.
--font-size=...
Set font size. Note that you cannot use pixels or pt here. The
size is a floating point value, defaulting to 0.025.
--foreground=...
Set foreground color. The format is the same as for HTML/CSS,
i.e. aabbcc, in RGB values. Default is white (ffffff).
--format=...
Set PNG pixel format. Available values are ARGB32 (default),
RGB24 and A8 (alpha values, 8 bits per pixel).
--height=...
Set output height in pixels. Default is 480.
--html-input
Unfortunately this is probably not what you are looking for.
This program will *not* render HTML pages. Instead, it reads
the exact format that is output from the program jp2a using the
options `--colors --html-raw' (see http://jp2a.sourceforge.net
for more information on jp2a).
This is used to color the characters. For reference, the format
is this:
<span style='color:#rrggbb;'>A</span><br/>
The <br/> is used to break lines. No newlines are accepted, and
the code to parse this input is extremely bad, so you shouldn't
get your hopes up for this one.
--help-h
Print help.
--linespacing=...
Sets amount of extra pixels to add between each line. The de-
fault is to add 2 pixels. You can set this to zero, or even
negative values.
--no-crop
Do not crop away the unused image areas after rendering the
text.
--output=...
Set output filename or a directory to write the files to.
--overwrite
Overwrite existing files. The default is not to overwrite, in-
stead adding a numbered suffix to the filename. That is, if you
convert foo.txt you get foo.png the first time you convert. The
second time you'll get foo2.png and so on.
--verbose
Print verbose output messages. This is useful when you want to
know the cropping dimensions, and when converting multiple files
to see their output names.
--width=...
Set output width in pixels. Default is 640.
--version-V
Print program version and exit.
--silent-s
Silent mode; do not print any messages to the console.
--size=WxH
Set output width and height in pixels. Default is 640x480.
--tab=...
Set the number of spaces that tab characters will expand to.
Default is 8.
EXAMPLES
Convert files to 800x600 pixels: a2png --size=800x600 file1 file2
Convert text from standard input: a2png --size=800x600 -
Convert file with yellow background: a2png --background=ffff00 some-
file.txt
RETURN VALUES
a2png returns 0 for success and 1 for errors.
BUGS
Carriage returns do not work correctly; they do not replace the charac-
ters they overwrite, so you get garbled output.
The --transparent option does not work with gdlib.
The --bold option does not work with gdlib.
Only Latin1 characters are accepted, although the subsystems do support
UTF-8.
Check the web at http://a2png.sourceforge.net for new versions, these
issues might very well be fixed in future updates.
AUTHOR
Christian Stigen Larsen <csl@sublevel3.org> -- http://csl.sublevel3.orgLICENSE
a2png is distributed under the GNU General Public License v2.
version 0.1 September 22, 2006 a2png(1)